contact@onbelief.orgReader Responses Page 4
Bill: (The) Manifesto is fascinating; gets me thinking. I immediately come up with some objections... which really aren't objections. And I have a very hard time describing them verbally.
The sun will rise in the morning. Is this a fact? Absolutely not, because the sun STAYS STILL. And the horizon descends. (Or actually the horizon rolls forward and down, carrying us up over the shadowed hump and into the sunlight.) Yet it's EXTREMELY useful to think of the sun as rising and setting; making its way across the bowl of the emperyan substance. Try this: spend many hours imagining the sun as being unmoving, and the world as rolling slowly while carrying you and your surroundings along. At the same time, spend those hours thinking of yourself as standing NOT on a flat landscape, but instead standing at the top of a huge spherical hill, with radial gravity that will tilt your perceived vertical and keep you at the "top" should you try walking down the curve of that "hill." First practice doing this for a few seconds at a time, then minutes. Then spend a day outdoors and see how long you can maintain that view before the world snaps back into unmoving "flatness" with a sun moving above.
See? "Facts" vary with beliefs, and "Concepts" are a critical part of the world we live in, and the sun DOESN'T rise in the morning, yet it certainly DOES. Which belief is more correct: living on a flat landscape with a moving sun, or living on a rolling stone ball with an unmoving sun? I might say that the latter is more correct, but I also might say that the question itself is wrong. The flat earth is more useful in everyday life, so "factual correctness" might in this case be a dead end street that leads to rigid thinking and intolerance of ambiguous or multi-valued interpretations. Concepts conferring an ability to understand" perhaps should be valued above "correct facts," should the two be mutually exclusive. If I had to choose between "knowing the correct answer" versus "seeing several useful interpretations," I'd choose the latter.
As an (amateur) scientist, I try to live in a world based on this Feynman concept: "If you don't have two or three separate ways of describing something in physics, then you don't really understand that thing." I can describe a certain drawing as being an old woman with a big nose and a kerchief, or a young woman looking away. Which description is the correct one? Both. Also I can describe three dots on a map as forming a triangle, or as determining a single circle scribed on the landscape... but when I start seeing the circle, I give up seeing the triangle. Which view is the more genuine? Both, and this suggests that most of us have become biased by our science-schooling which derogates "opinions" and demands correct answers rather than employing essay-questions on exams. Focusing on solid facts is a valuable tool in ones' repertoire, but many other tools exist. All of reality, including false beliefs and simple fact, is really an invisible elephant, and we are blind men who can only feel the tree-trunk legs or the flexible snake nose, but can never experience a complete"elephant," since we have to drop the trunk before we can grasp the leg.
I suspect that all of the above is what Zen practitioners are talking about when they say that the world is an illusion. The world isn't "fake," instead the world is changed depending on the perceivers' ability to understand it. Walk outside while being a biologist, then walk outside while being a physicist, and you see two different and *mutually exclusive* worlds, neither of which is "correct." The world is three dots on which we scribe either a circle or a triangle but never both, and where"triangle" and "circle" are higher-level concepts: illusions which are as solid and real as chairs and tables.
So, is all of the above a kind of personal "religion?" I tell myself that it is: "science religion" where I want to see the world as it really is, trying to teach my brain to see the Elephant, to grasp the Tesseract itself and not just its three-D wire-frame shadow, and I'm learning to let go of my obsession with solid facts whenever it interferes with my ability to assemble qualia/concepts/beliefs in novel ways which confer new levels of understanding.
I've found one valuable path into the mess: things that we've known all our lives which turn out to be wrong. Kicks in the head which loosen our rigidity: http://amasci.com/miscon/miscon4.html . Here's another: learning the creation of odd viewpoints by a practice of letting go of adult reality and immersing ourselves in an earlier world: http://amasci.com/brain/Commentary: Thanks Bill. You have given me much to think about. Perhaps a year from now, when I have given much thought to your ideas I will be able to post a more detailed answer.
My first response is that education, in its widest sense, should stimulate both rational thinking and creativity. The result of this process for some will be to look at the world in novel ways. For others, it will pose unresolved conflicts due to logical or descriptive incompleteness and therefore result in logically 'fuzzy' interpretations of the world, such as wave-particle duality.
There will often be more than one useful way to conceive of a situation, as you have cleverly demonstrated. Another example might be the metaphor of 'the selfish gene', which Richard Dawkins has given us. From this view point we see the gene as the central entity of biological existence rather than the phenotype (body). In everyday life that idea does not make much sense. However when we begin to examine biological evolution the advantages of using that viewpoint become more evident. I argue that we need to ask what is the function and ultimate purpose of our analysis. The ideas you have posed then becomes less abstract for me. For those who ask 'why questions' for example one from of analysis will be appropriate. For the empiricist who asks 'how questions' different types of answers will be more productive.
In addition I feel that we should consider our perspective using the coherence theory of truth and ask what set of perspectives give us a more utilitarian and more consistent view of the world. When we encounter propositions that do not appear to cohere we are then forced into a rethink, in so far as we are rational. There will be situations where a proposition is absent within our minds and so coherence seems unobtainable. In that situation we should then be mindful of the logic of belief revision.
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I am happy to discuss the ideas expressed on this site with religious and non-religious people alike. However despite my contentious remarks about religion, I no longer see any personal value in debating the correctness of particular details of the many theologies that exist with the religious or 'non-believers' and do not obtain any satisfaction from doing so. Perhaps you could direct such comments to a 'believer', priest, minster of religion, theologian, philosopher, atheist or skeptical thinker as you think appropriate. I hope you will not see that request as arrogance on my part but merely as a desire to move on to other areas of debate, which at this time in my life, I view as more productive. If you have been personally insulted by what I have written you have my sincere apologies for I seek to challenge rather than insult. I can say very little to those who see all challenges to their beliefs as an insult, especially if those challenges come in the form of newspaper cartoons. Otherwise your comment is very welcome.
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